Fall 2011 Undergraduate English Courses: Twentieth Century

350:311 Twentieth Century Literature I

In this course we will read fiction and non-fiction published (mostly) between 1900 and 1945 that in some way initiates, exemplifies, or responds to the aesthetic and philosophical phenomenon known as “modernism.” Literary modernism saw itself as a critique of certain inherited, conventional, and constraining ideas about art, subjectivity, reality, sexuality, morality, nationality, race, and power. Modernists tended to romanticize their own anti-romantic proclivities, and thus to become enamored of, and troubled by, subjectivity as they saw it mirrored by and enacted in language. To an unprecedented extent they viewed literary language as the instrument and agent of transformation, both for the individual and the culture.